This book selects 100 humorous stories from 25 joke collections from the early Sui to the late Qing Dynasty, including among many others Smile Alluring Records written by Hou Bai in the early Sui Dynasty, Laughter Mansion, Laughter Mansion Expanded and Telling Tales compiled by Feng Menglong, famous writer of the Ming dynasty. The pithy and humorous jokes show in a profile the lifestyle and mentality of Chinese people over the long history.

Preface

…Humorous stories written by Chinese writers through the ages are legion and the earliest dates back to the Kingdom of Wei (220-265) when Handan Chun wrote his Jest Books. The anthologists chose his pieces from more than 70 books of all kinds, covering a period from the Three Kingdoms up to the latter part of the Qing Dynasty. The pieces chosen generally embodied the characteristic features of the humorous stories written by prominent writers at different epochs. Short and pithy, they dramatized the farcical episodes of the common people’s life under the prevailing social conditions. The real life of the common people was the fountainhead of source material for creative writing. On the basis o the superficial phenomena of all affairs of life, writers of humorous stories were able to draw the most sweeping generalizations. They probed into the essence of things and by highlighting the salient features of universal significance uglified the villains in their stories, thus reproducing characters remarkably true to life. And by artistic exaggeration they brought out with their trenchant pen the wickedness of the feudal society and the evils of bureaucracy and corrupted morals. …..

About the translator

Lu Yunzhong is at present Associate Professor of English in the English Department of Shanghai Foreign Languages University and is concurrently English advisor to Comparative Literature in China, an academic journal published by the Shanghai Research Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures. His recent translations include: From Chinese into English – Strange Tales of Liaozhai, On to Middle Age, Groundwork, and Between Man and Demon; From English to Chinese – Cairo Documents, Guns in August, The Middle East in the War, The Selfish Gene, War and Remembrance, and Points of English Syntax.